MobileMe Status — Steve Jobs has asked me to write a posting every other day or so to let everyone know what's happening with MobileMe, and I'm working directly with the MobileMe group to ensure that we keep you really up to date. In the 14 days since we launched, it's been a rocky road …

Google Walks Away From Digg Deal — The Google/Digg acquisition negotiations were in full swing as of last Tuesday, had passed the term sheet stage and the two companies were in final negotiations in the $200 million range. But sometime this last week Google decided to walk from the deal.

Amazon Explains The S3 Outage and Downtime Last Weekend — Amazon has posted an announcement regarding what happened last weekend with their S3 storage service and the downtime of nearly 8 hours. We covered the outage extensively here on CenterNetworks. Overall the downtime ran from 8:40am Pacific Time to 5:00pm Pacific Time.

The Silicon Valley VC Disease — Yesterday at the Mobile Web Wars event (here's video of that), held right before the TechCrunch party, David Hornik, partner at August Capital (he's the host of the TechCrunch party) told the audience that he would not invest in pure iPhone apps because the iPhone …

First It Was Song Downloads. Now It's Organic Chemistry. — AFTER scanning his textbooks and making them available to anyone to download free, a contributor at the file-sharing site PirateBay.org composed a colorful message for “all publishers” of college textbooks, warning them that …

Finding and Fixing a Home's Power Hogs — WHILE we all worry about where we're going to get more energy in an increasingly energy-obsessed world, there's also another alternative: Use less power. That may soon be simpler, thanks to the introduction of a bevy of inexpensive devices …

Honesty Is The Best Policy — This quote from Joe Nocera's piece on Steve Job's health in today's NYT shocked me: … I'm personally with Joe on this one. Steve Jobs is an arrogant f**k who thinks he's above the law. He's also the most amazing technology CEO/entrepreneur working right now.

Techcrunch August Capital Event Wrapup — Thank you to the nearly 1,100 people who flowed through the Quadras Conference Center for our Mobile Web Wars event and the party at August Capital immediately afterwards. We were able to donate $7,500 to Malaria No More, which will protect at least 750 children from Malaria for five years.

Photosynth Moves to Virtual Earth — Ever since the launch of Photosynth there's been much discussion about the natural synergy of it and Microsoft Virtual Earth. Well, it's now official that you can begin additional speculation on what it means that we've moved the Photosynth team into the Virtual Earth product group.

Comcast communicated by blog — We are watching you.... A Washington student got a bit of a shock when he received an email from internet service provider Comcast about comments he had made on his blog. — Brandon Dilbeck, a student at the University of Washington …

Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading? — BEREA, Ohio — Books are not Nadia Konyk's thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest. — Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet.